An Enterprise Quality Management System (EQMS) is a type of software usable for tracking quality issues in a variety of situations. One exemplary use case for such systems is in pharmaceutical manufacturing. Pharmaceutical manufacturers could use an on-premises EQMS to keep track of the manufacture of a particular drug or device. Each step of a process of creating that device may be accompanied by the storage or manipulation of data in the EQMS. This enables auditing, record-keeping, compliance with Federal requirements, storage of relevant documents or data, and the like.
A manufacturer may be in a business relationship with one or more suppliers that provide the manufacturer with goods, services, raw materials, or finished products. For example, if the manufacturer sells a particular drug that is made using a solid product and a liquid product, one supplier may provide a solid product, another supplier may provide a liquid product, and a third supplier may provide testing equipment for testing the potency of the final product. Each of these suppliers may utilize different EQMSes for managing their production of the materials used by the manufacturer. This can create problems. For example, if a supplier of the solid product finds that the solid product is slightly off of a specification mandated by the manufacturer, the supplier may not be able to send the measurements alerting the manufacturer of this, because both the manufacturer and the supplier use different EQMSes. The supplier may need to call or email the manufacturer with that information, which can yield incorrect information and/or slow response times. If the manufacturer can use the solid product anyway despite the defects, the supplier wastes time in trying to contact the manufacturer to relay the discrepancy information.
For similar reasons, it is difficult for both the supplier and the manufacturer to synchronize workflow information. If the manufacturer and the supplier each use different EQMSes, each of which have different workflow steps, a supplier sending information indicating what a state the supplier is at in their workflow would not necessarily make sense to the manufacturer.
Embodiments of the present disclosure solve these problems as well as others.